New York Times, Thursday, November 5, 2015

Three things:

(1) The final grid I submitted had NEW SHOOTER instead of PEA SHOOTER at 11-Down (and RENT at 13-Down, in case you're wondering). My clue for NEW SHOOTER was [Croupier cry as dice are passed]. I still like NEW SHOOTER, but I agree that PEA SHOOTER is the better entry.

(2) Only 33 of my original clues made the final cut. (Happily, that includes [Column that's beside the point?] for TENTHS.) Another nine had to be edited for length or clarification, but poor Will and company had to completely re-write 31 of the clues (plus the clues for the revised entries discussed above). I'll try to do better.

(3) Did you notice that the NTH breaks at a different point in each of the three theme entries? ALL IN THE FAMILY breaks after the N, EVENT HORIZON breaks after the T, and ELEVENTH HOUR breaks after the H (well, okay, it doesn't really "break" there, but you get the idea). That was intentional, since I worried that if two entries broke at the same point it would look inconsistent for the third to break at a different point. Maybe I overthink these things.

I always enjoy hearing Sam's voice come through in his puzzles. Today brings us such nice colloquial clues: ["I'm right here, you know"] for AHEM and ["Am I the only one …"] for IS IT ME. Also great to get OH FUN, something I can imagine Sam saying.

Onto the puzzle! Sam interprets HIGHER POWER as "phrases containing NTH; those three letters get raised above the answer." The bizarre-looking ALLIEFAMILY is actually ALL IN THE FAMILY, with the answer turning up, heading right, jogging back SW, and finishing out. Some nice themers, with ELEVENTH HOUR and EVENT HORIZON both strong.

(Minor ding for NTH and ELEVENTH being too similar for my taste.)

Pretty good execution considering the difficulties of filling around those themers. When you fold answers up like this, it creates many constraints in the crossings. The area around ELEVENTH HOUR is actually quite good, with the snappy PEA SHOOTER (I do like NEW SHOOTER as well) and CRIES UNCLE worked in there. Including those parallel long downs makes that region even tougher to fill cleanly and zestily, so only a NEG and an ATCO (and the arbitrary-ish AGE ONE) is a win.

The areas around the other two themers didn't come out quite as well, with the odd ENISLE up top and STOL (short take-off and landing) down below. Still, that's not bad considering how tough it is to work with these folded types of answers.

Some great clues:

• The TENTHS column is indeed beside the (decimal) point! Gold star for this one.
• [Beast of Borden] is ELSIE, Borden's "spokescow."
• FLAGs get waved at the Olympics, but EPEEs do as well. Nice deception.

I did like seeing those NTHs raised one row, but I didn't quite buy HIGHER POWER as a solid rationale for the serpentine path each themer took. I'm probably taking it too literally, but to me, HIGHER POWER might have been NTH sitting on top of SQUARE and CUBE — powers of two and three — or FIRE, WILL, SOLAR and other different types of powers. It was fun to scratch my head as I tried to figure out the trick, though.